Articles Posted in Clients

Law school and law firm culture inculcate three orientations that pull at cross-purposes to what consummate in-house attorneys need to do. These three values, as quoted, come from a General Counsel Roundtable publication.

“Excessive focus on quality.” This may serve law review authors and citation checkers as well as associates racking up billable hours, but in the hurly-burly of business, practical advice given quickly rings the bell. As they say, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

“Bias against scalable solutions.” Bespoke craftsmanship, one-on-one counsel, and a credo of careful attention to each client’s needs hobbles an in-house lawyer’ embrace of technology that allows knowledge sharing and one-to-many delivery systems (See my post of May 18, 2008: self service with 7 references.). In-house lawyers need to promote leverageable, disseminated legal knowledge.

Three times I have commented on how to train internal clients and I mentioned 11 different techniques (See my post of July 14, 2005: lecture, lecture discussion, film, small group discussion, case studies, role playing, practical exercises, and unstructured exercises; Dec. 19, 2005: “in-class training, computer-based training [CBT], and paper-based training; and Dec. 20, 2005: checklists of what clients need to gather before calling and posts on the intranet.). Nearly a score of additional training tools are available to law departments

1. Explain your advice
2. Publish answers to Frequently Asked Questions

Lawyers for corporations always want a “seat at the table.” But sometimes, if the truth be told, it is a good idea not to be at the table. For example, if a business manager brings along an in-house lawyer to a meeting with another company’s executive, the mere presence of the lawyer may dampen the do-business spirit of the meeting (and I do not mean that collusion and anti-competitive behavior rears its head). A lawyer conveys to the other side significance and risk. An acute corollary of this is sending outside counsel to an EEOC hearing. “Wow,” thinks the examiner, “they must really be worried about this, so let me dig deeper.”

Some executives may dislike bringing an internal lawyer to a meeting lest the lawyer intimidate the other side or push them to bring their own lawyer (See my post of May 8, 2007: lawyers may intimidate their own clients.).

An article in The Bus. Lawyer, Vol, 64, Feb. 2009 at 309, makes the point that lawyers often take the blame for a deal collapsing when in fact business executives sidestepped tough issues that eventually came to light through the lawyers and scuttled the deal. “Businessmen when bargaining often talk only in pleasant glittering generalities, think they have a contract, but fail to reach agreement on any of the hard, unpleasant questions until forced to do so by a lawyer.”

This criticism – “deal breakers” – is a cross in-house counsel must bear. Unfair as it may be, clients want to blame someone.

Have you considered “single-point post-transaction” reviews? “At the end of each transaction ask individual business colleagues within your organization for one improvement suggestion. This should be one improvement you and your external lawyers can make to continue to improve the service that you provide.”

This technique comes from Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) at 81. Keep the question simple, easily and quickly answered by a thoughtful client, and to the point of continuous improvement (See my post of May 27, 2008: post mortems with 7 references.).

Most in-house lawyers, I would wager, refer to fellow employees who seek their legal advice as “clients.” Others, a much smaller number, vociferously reject that term. They perceive themselves as working together with fellow employees on a team and disavow some of the implications of the term “client” (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: MetLife refers to “business partners”; and Oct. 8, 2007: banish the word “client”.). Perhaps one of those implications is that in-house lawyers are less familiar with the business and less enablers of it when in a client relationship. Other differences occur to me.

Clients pay. Clients come to in-house lawyers, as clients come to law firms, but few pay for the services. At least not directly. It is the small minority of clients who receive bills from the law department for hours worked and actually transfer funds internally (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: charge backs of internal lawyer time with 8 references.).

https://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/the-debate-on-whether-to-track-and-charge-back-time-to-clients/

Managers of legal departments lack a descriptive metric for the degree to which in-house lawyers are relied on by clients. For example, no general counsel can say anything like “30 percent of the VPs and above last year turned to the law department appropriately at least 75 percent of the time.”

In fact, if we break down that fanciful statement, we have to acknowledge that client satisfaction surveys do not attempt to peg market penetration, so to speak. For instance, of all the clients at a given level, what percentage of them sought guidance from the legal department at all during the past year? That set of numbers implies that the rank of a client makes a difference (See my post of May 31, 2005: client rank has its privileges in satisfaction surveys.).

If a survey captured that information, it is still just a starting point. How much did the clients at that level make use of the law department? And, if we had plausible metrics for amounts of use at a given level, how would we ascertain whether the use covered some, most, or all of the circumstances when legal advice would help?

Law departments in these parlous times suffer layoffs. True, the volume of work may decline as sales slump, but headcount reductions often do not correspond to reductions in workload. If not, if there are fewer lawyers to do essentially the same amount of work, then clients need to change some of their expectations and roles. Clients will need to do a better job:

1. gathering documents before calling for legal review;
2. avoiding asking lawyers to do quasi-legal work;

The law department of Carillion develops an annual Legal Exposure Plan for each of its major client groups. As described in Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) at 16, the plan covers multiple ways “to bring our working relationships with our client businesses closer, covering in detail how we would bring the legal strategy to life…” Among the eight ways listed are “training and development”, “know-how,” “risk management,” and “precedents.”

The Plans appear to be ambitiously broad and to go beyond a typical service level agreement (See my post of May 14, 2005: standards of service; July 9, 2007: example of Koch Industries; March 23, 2008: service level agreement spells out response times; June 28, 2006: “client profiles”; Jan. 21, 2009: value-indicator checklist is similar to SLA; and Feb. 14, 2009: demand management at Royal Bank of Canada.).

The 2005 issue of Robert Half Legal’s Future Law Office report, “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,” at 13, quotes a senior lawyer in the legal department of Ernst & Young. When a client satisfaction survey revealed that clients wanted faster responses to phone calls and e-mails, the general counsel’s office instituted a new policy. According to it, the goal is to get back to any client within two hours. Not to resolve the issue that quickly, but to “acknowledge requests promptly so that people know they will receive assistance.”

The letter of the two-hour policy could be observed, but the spirit falter. Clients do like to know you got the call, email, fax, or instant message – but even more they want guidance. A return receipt quickly delivered doesn’t do all that much, although it is better than a black hole.